Gossip Girl

It seems preposterous even to type the following sentence: The television version of “Gossip Girl” on CW tonight does not quite live up to the novels.Some will be relieved, since this series of young-adult novels by Cecily von Ziegesar — about rich Upper East Side teenagers who drink martinis, smoke marijuana, shop and shoplift and cut class to have sex in Park Avenue penthouses — is “Reefer Madness” for parents. It is possibly the scariest tableau of prep school privilege since Robert Chambers requested another round at Dorrian’s Red Hand in 1986.Josh Schwartz, creator of “The OC,” is an executive producer and writer of “Gossip Girl,” and helped turn it into an East Coast version of that other show: “The EC.”Gossip Girl 2007 Season 1-6 Download.

It’s a sleek, glossy, musically enhanced soap opera centered on wealthy, gorgeous high school students who connive and cavort to the sound of Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, Peter Bjorn and John, Angels & Airwaves, and Timbaland. The television version does not violate the books’ basic principles: The anonymous Gossip Girl is an unseen narrator (Kristen Bell, “Veronica Mars”) who blogs about the movements and misdeeds of Serena (Blake Lively), her B.F.F. Blair (Leighton Meester) and other friends as they drink, smoke pot and hook up at trendy clubs.

But the CW adaptation pumps up the importance of parents, particularly Rufus, father to Dan (Penn Badgley) and Jenny (Taylor Momsen), middle-class Brooklyn kids who chafe beneath the scorn of their more glamorous classmates. In the novels Rufus is a minor figure, a scraggily failed poet with bad hygiene; here he is played by Matthew Settle as a former rock musician with romantic problems of his own, including a history with Serena’s snobby mother.“Gossip Girl,” along with similar series like “The A-List” and “The Clique,” is Mean Girl lit, mass-market paperbacks that put “Sex and the City” in a teenage context, with lots of sex and erotic brand names like Prada, Absolut and St. Barts.